These lyrics from a favorite song of mine—“Ocean of Noise,” by Arcade Fire—kept tumbling through my mind the days preceding my debut. I was torn between feeling like I was responsible for my own participation and feeling like I had been coerced. I kept coming back to the understanding, though, that I simply did not have a choice to not participate in the first place. For me, declining my invitation, though technically offered by my parents as an option, was simply not available, as my two older sisters before me had participated and my parents had emphasized the sentimental familial value to their last daughter making her debut. My “consent” consequentially boiled down to fear of guilt. I was curious, then, going into this project, as to how other debutantes had ended up participating in the ritual, as well as how they felt about their
position as debutantes. Do they describe their participation in terms of enthusiasm, ambivalence, resistance, or declination? How do they understand their own options for either participating or not participating? How does pressure from others complicate choice for debutantes? This section, therefore, addresses questions of willingness, choice, and pressure, as it pertains to the participation of debutante women.
Degrees of willingness
In each semi-structured interview with participating debutantes, I described four categories of degrees of willingness for participation: enthusiastic, ambivalent, resistant, and declining. (Although clearly only the first three would apply to participating debutantes, and only the last category can be applied to the one prospective debutante I interviewed who chose not to participate.) Among the fifteen participating debutantes, I expected that there would be a fair degree of variety as to how debutantes would qualify their participation. I was surprised to find, however, that only four debutantes described themselves as fully enthusiastic, only three
identified as fully ambivalent, and none described themselves as fully resistant. Although I did not explicitly offer spectrums from one category to the next as an option within interviews, eight debutantes described themselves using two categories—three of whom claimed to be between enthusiastic and ambivalent, and five of whom claimed to be between ambivalent and resistant. See Table 2 for debutante degrees of willingness and reasons identified for participation.
Table 2. Debutante degrees of willingness. Fifteen participating debutantes; one non- participating debutante.
NAME
(PSEUDONYMS)
ROLE DECADE OF
PARTICIPATION
DEGREE OF WILLIGNESS REASONS IDENTIFIED FOR PARTICIPATION
Emily Sister of
debutante; Debutante
2000s; 2010s Enthusiastic Family, Friends, Fun
Summer Head
Debutante
Megan Debutante Leader
2010s Enthusiastic Family, Friends, Fun
Elaine Debutante 1940s Enthusiastic Family, Friends
Hillary Sister of debutante; Debutante
2000s; 2010s Enthusiastic/Ambivalent Family, Friends, Fun
Hannah Debutante 2010s Enthusiastic/Ambivalent Family, Fun
Allie Debutante
Leader
2010s Enthusiastic/Ambivalent Family, Fun
Natalie Debutante;
Mother of declining debutante
1970s Ambivalent Family, Fun
Molly Debutante 2010s Ambivalent Family, Friends, Fun
Lauren Sister of
debutante; Debutante
2000s; 2010s Ambivalent Family, Friends, Fun
Beth Debutante 2010s Ambivalent/Resistant Family
Meredith Debutante 2010s Ambivalent/Resistant Family
Emma Debutante 2010s Ambivalent/Resistant Family, Friends, Fun
Sophie Sister of
debutante; Debutante
2000s; 2010s Ambivalent/Resistant Family, Fun
Catherine Debutante 2010s Ambivalent/Resistant Family
Kelsey Prospective
Debutante
2010s Declining Lack of family, friends,
and fun
The data shows that, though most participating debutantes needed to use more than one category to describe their willingness for participation, other debutantes felt comfortable categorizing themselves as fully one of the four degrees. The only category that no debutante fully identified with, however, is “resistant.” Any debutante who used this category as a description of her participation also felt the need to partially identify as ambivalent. The qualitative data shows that this apprehension to claim full resistance came, often, not from a statement of personal partial acceptance to the debutante ball, but rather from limited possibilities for resistance in the first place. For several debutantes, this decision to not fully resist participation was explained in terms of costs versus benefits. For example, participant
Sophie explained: “It would have caused unnecessary problems if I had [resisted].” Similarly, participant Meredith explained that resisting participation would cause harm in her relationship with her father, which she was not willing to risk. After weighing the costs and benefits of participation, Meredith concluded: “So I don’t think it was really worth it to resist when it’s like, one weekend of my life.”
Implied in resistant/ambivalent debutantes’ reasons for not fully resisting participating is the pre-existing expectation of participation. This automatically situates prospective debutantes on the defense if they want to break away from expectations and decline their invitation. In other words, due to assumptions concerning participation, these debutantes are put in a place where, if they want to elect to not participate, they are already up against forces that constrain resistance. This phenomenon is nicely demonstrated by participant Catherine, who, when asked to
categorize her debutante participation as one of the four degrees of willingness, answered:
I would say somewhere between ambivalent and completely resistant, because I wouldn’t say that I was necessarily that intrigued by it. I kind of feel like before I was a deb I had enough knowledge to know that I wasn’t interested in it and to understand what it was, but at the same time I would say that I wasn’t completely resistant to it, mostly because [pause] I felt like the decision had already been made before it was asked of me.
Catherine’s answer demonstrates a crucial component that must be present if
participation is to be talked about in terms of willingness at all: choice, meaning the free ability to say yes or no. Since autonomous choice is not present for some debutantes, the idea of willingness and consent is complicated, as they cannot adequately express their own agency for participating or not participating. As Table 2 shows, debutantes who identify as partially resistant are the only category of participants who only identify “family” as a reason for participation, showing that family pressures and expectations often play a role in the stripping away of women’s autonomous decision-making abilities concerning debutante participation.
It was kind of a thing where I wasn’t physically forced to go, but [pause] I didn’t really have a choice not to go [laughter.]—participant Sophie
In every interview, I asked research participants to walk me through their decision- making process as to whether or not they would participate as a debutante. For many
participating debutantes I spoke with, their participation in the ball was not a decision that was reached through a process, but was rather something that was framed as expected, or already decided. Phrases such as “there was no question” appeared several times throughout the data, as debutantes communicated to me that there was not a decision-making process to be had about their participation.
For debutantes who identified along the spectrum from enthusiastic to ambivalent, the nonexistence of a decision-making process did not particularly bother them, due to their lack of strong feelings against the ball. For example, Lauren, who described herself as ambivalent, explained: “I don’t remember feeling particularly excited or that I didn’t want to do it. I just sort of always knew that I was going to do it, so I didn’t think about it that much.” Similarly,
enthusiastic participant Emily stated: “[Laughter] There was no decision. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to do it, it was just kind of something that I knew that I would eventually do when I got to nineteen years old or however old I was.” When I asked enthusiastic participant Summer—who was the head debutante the year of her debut—if she could walk me through her decision-making process, she replied: “No, it was pretty much like I was—I mean my parents probably would have let me think about it, but I think they definitely would have encouraged me to do it. It was kind of expected.” These interviews revealed that even for women who did not feel strongly against making their debut, or were even in favor of making their debut, participation was not something that they could fully affirm for themselves, because the decision had already been made, often due to pre-existing expectations from family members. Furthermore, these quotes
show that consideration of not participating—a process that would be required in the definition of “choice”—was not encouraged in these debutantes. Indeed, one parent I spoke with admitted that the possibility of declining an invitation to debut was not discussed with his children: “I think it was just always assumed that they would do that, so we really didn’t have a lot of [pause] conversation about it. [Pause] It was just assumed that they would do it, and it’s just part of a family tradition” (participant Gordon).
Debutantes who identified along the spectrum from ambivalent to resisting similarly described their choices as limited, although these debs were more likely than enthusiastic debs or fully ambivalent debs to be critical of this lack of choice. While critical of this absence of a decision-making process, these debs often affirmed, in one way or another, their ultimate position as debutantes. For some debs, this took the form of cost versus benefit analysis, in which their expression of willingness to participate involved weighing social gains versus social losses—an analysis that exemplifies a lack of total free will. For example, ambivalent/resistant debutante Meredith explained: “I never really said yes and my dad just kind of signed me up. And then I was like, ‘oh wait, you signed me up? Really?’ And I was just like, okay. I mean I was never really angry about it, cause I was just like, it’s not worth it, I’m just going to do it.” Similarly, ambivalent/resistant debutante Emma reconciled her feelings of lack of choice with her ultimate participation in a type of social cost versus social benefit analysis:
It wasn’t really a process. Like I guess I [pause] especially because it wasn’t a thing that happened when I received the invitation so much as it was like…a very gradual understanding that it would be a thing that I might probably do. And I’ve never really felt like I had like total [pause] like I could do whatever I wanted, because, I don’t know. Or I guess I decided to do it because I thought it would be more harm to not do it than to do it. And it’s not that it would be harmful, but I figured that I might as well, because, um [pause] God, I’m trying to think of why I did it. [Laughter]
These interviews show one reason why “choice” is difficult to measure in the case of the debutante ball: for many participants, choice does not exist. Debutantes across degrees of
willingness recognize an absence of a decision-making process, although the ways debutantes discuss this lack of autonomy varies with degrees of willingness. Generally, enthusiastic or fully ambivalent debutantes do not see this lack of choice as an issue, whereas ambivalent/resistant debutantes bemoan their lack of autonomy, but ultimately justify their participation in other terms.
Nuances of pressure
Despite recognizing that options for decision-making were limited, several
ambivalent/enthusiastic debutantes claimed that, when it came down to it, they did, indeed, participate in the deb ball out of their own choice. For example, whereas participant Emma claimed, as featured in the quote above, that she “never really felt … like I could do whatever I wanted,” she goes on her interview to tell me that “it was definitely a choice.” In her explanation, she describes deciding to give her family something that they wanted, and grapples over whether or not she would have felt guilty if she had denied them of the deb experience. Emma’s
explanation of choice is a nice demonstration of another obstacle to measuring choice for debutantes: nuances of pressure. For example, several debutantes I spoke with described that their parents technically gave them free choice, yet nudged them in the direction of participation by appealing to family obligation and fear of regret. One father I spoke with, Arthur, explained why he urged his daughter to participate, even though he knew she did not want to:
I think we probably looked at it more on the line that, ‘hey, if you don’t do it, you might look back on it and say, oh, I wish I had done it.’ So I think we were more concerned that it would be something that she would regret she did not do than, say, putting pressure on her to do it. There’s so many times when people say, ‘oh, if I had just done so-and-so.’ But you can’t go back and get it.
Many debutantes I spoke with articulated fear that they would regret not participating for one reason or another. Often, this fear took the form of family continuation, as the rumor
prospective debutante declines. Indeed, the one declining deb I spoke with, Kelsey, told me that the possibility of her sister not receiving an invitation is the one reason why she can see herself regretting her declining decision in the future. Parents of interviewees often argued that their daughters should not be deciding for their future children whether or not they have the
opportunity to participate. For example, Catherine explained this pressure from her mother as a contributing factor to her participation: “My mom said at one point, she was like, ‘[Name], you never know, what if you have a daughter who would love this kind of thing? And if you don’t do it that could potentially prohibit her from doing it.’ And I was like, ‘well, I can’t really speak to what my future daughter may or may not want …’” Of course, however, this cycle of
participation yields an absence of choice and an elimination of decision for all prospective debutantes, if every woman is warned of the future harms of not participating.
Another way that debutantes found the “choice” given them from their parents to be compromised was through guilt concerning grandparents. Several debs I spoke with talked about the possibility of their grandparents passing away soon, and emphasized the family gathering of the deb ball as a way to have special time with their grandparents. Several of these participants likened the deb ball to a wedding, claiming that, since they cannot be sure that their grandparents will be alive for their wedding, it was nice to have everyone together and all dressed up for the debutante ball. This focus on family time and on (close-to-death) grandparents seemed to
emotionally manipulate debutantes into participating. For example, Emma described this type of pressure during our interview: “[Mom] would just be like, ‘I think it would mean a lot to
[grandmother],’ like she says that a lot. Which is just like, gosh, f***, like what do you want me to say to that?”
In my interview with participant Molly, I came to better understand the nuances of pressure that debutantes face in decision-making processes:
[Mom] is like, ‘I’m not going to make you do it,’ she’s like ‘I would encourage you to, this is one of those things that’s not going to happen again, this is your one chance to do it, I think it will be a lot of fun for you,’ she tried to talk me into it but she was also understanding, she was like ‘I’m not going to make you do this, I understand if you really don’t want to, I’m not going to do that to you.’ She said ‘this should be something that you want to do’ but she also kind of made me feel bad because she was like ‘I don’t want you to regret not doing it.’ So, but I wouldn’t have, I maybe would have felt a little guilty if I hadn’t have done it…
Here Molly displays how parental pressure can carry mixed messages: on the one hand, her mother wanted her debut to be her own decision, but on the other hand, her mother heavily interfered with this process, instilling fear of regret. Indeed, in the very course of attempting to give her daughter “choice” and denying the existence of any pressure, this mother made her daughter “feel bad,” which ultimately led to Molly’s “decision” to participate.
More than one debutante who identified as enthusiastic admitted, after thinking about it more, that there was pressure from their families to participate. However, they rationalized this by saying that they did not feel the pressure at the time, because participation was in line with their own identity. For example, enthusiastic participant Emily explained: “From my family there was really no pressure either way, it was just—it’s not like it was something, well it was
something expected, but I didn’t feel the pressure of that. In my head I’ve just kind of always known, ‘okay, I’m going to do this, this is a thing that my family has done for however many years, next year this is going to happen.’” When I asked Emily how her parents would have reacted if she had resisted her invitation to debut, she struggled to put herself in that position: “I honestly can’t even really imagine [pause] what [mom] would have done, had I not done it. So yeah, that’s kind of hard to think about. I think, had I been really skeptical about the whole thing, I think there would have been a lot of pressure, now that I’m thinking about it, from my whole family probably.” Here, Emily demonstrates an important concept in evaluating pressure and
choice: only debs who feel at all opposed to their debut feel pressure from their families, because to feel pressure necessarily requires at least a degree of resistance. Therefore, to say that only